Breast cancer has been ranked the leading cause of cancer deaths for females. Common imaging modalities, such as X-ray mammograms, MRI images and Ultrasound, used to detect breast cancers at present are mammogram and breast sonography. However, they both do not have a sufficient spatial resolution and are not sensitive enough to detect breast cancers. Although the MRI and the PET have the potential for early detection of breast cancers, they are both very costly and not usually used as the first-line defense.
Due to the advantages of non-invasion, non-contact, passivity, non-radiation and the ability of detecting the slight variations of temperature caused by neovascularization, Infrared imaging technique has been developed and employed for assessing chemotherapy treatment response. Serving as a medical imaging modality, the Infra-red (IR) image reveals the heat distribution on the surface of the human body. Cancerous tissues tend to have a higher temperature signature than their surrounding normal tissues, and for this reason, IR image has long been studied in hope to serve as an indicator for cancerous breast tissues. Nevertheless, the usefulness of IR images in detecting breast cancers at a single time is not usually enough to assess the chemotherapy treatment response and early detection due to the physiological and environmental influence on the skin temperature distribution. Alternatively, the IR images in detecting tumors over several time points attempt to determine the malignancy of breast tissues based on the variation of heat pattern.
Therefore, this present invention proposes to develop a mechanism used in passive medical imaging modality, called mechanism of quantitative dual-spectrum IR imaging for detection of malignant tumors in breast.
The accuracy of assessing the chemotherapy treatment response would be effected from the mechanism of imaging system. In the prior art, for example, X-ray mammograms, MRI images, Ultrasound and IR images (refer to Wirth, M. A., Narhan, J., Gray, D., “Nonrigid mammogram registration using mutual information,” Proc. SPIE. 2002), the mechanisms of the traditional imaging system for examining the breast cancer lack of the properties of the high reproducibility and the high adjustability, such as all adjustments are performed manually so that the reproducibility is low for examination at every different time points, the pair of cameras have to be can be calibrated after removing and installing them back and there are no armrests on the seat for carrying the object to retain a posture of the object in each photoing. Based on the above-mentioned, there are inhomogeneous and anisotropic soft tissues over the breast so the heat patterns will transform for the posture and the position of the patient changed at different time points. It will add the difference of the analysis process.
Therefore, the inventor thought of the idea of an improvement invention after considering the shortage of the prior art and finally invented the case of “mechanism of quantitative dual-spectrum IR imaging system for breast cancer”. The system is provided to obtain more usable information as testing at single time point and at several time points. Then, the obtained longitudinal dual spectrum infrared images can quantify the effect of chemotherapy by adding the information of heat changing with time via an image registration method, Dual-Spectrum Heat Pattern Separation (DS-HPS) algorithm (U.S. application Ser. No. 12/965,642, Dec. 10, 2010, filed by the applicant). The effects of chemotherapy on breast cancer are effectively traced and evaluated by using this method. The invention is briefly described as follows.